This animation was a way of getting more familiar with onion skinning and using the Light Box in Clip Studio paint so it’s turned out to be a bit of lame duck because, having drawn the 12 frames needed for one half of its waddle, I didn’t feel that I needed to continue to complete the second half of the step. If I was starting again, I’d pay as much attention to the sway of its body, which is such a feature of ducks waddling along.
Tag: Clip Studio Paint
Pony Phobia
Three weeks ago the hawthorn had burst into fresh green leaf and our local ponies were tucking into it. My comic strip is based on actual events: we were following two ponies along the lane, one of which whinnied and backed along a track when surprised by a blackbird bursting out of the hedge.
I was asking the rider of the other pony why hers, which was unruffled by the blackbird incident, kept so close to the hedge:
“It’s the hawthorn, he likes anything he can get his mouth around!”
As we stood back to let the ponies go by, a couple of the people who live by the stables were standing nearby drinking their morning coffee.
“Some of the ponies around here could do to see a psychologist!” I suggested.
“Not just the ponies,” the man agreed, “Some of the people too!”
I’ve struggled with this comic strip. I started drawing on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, then decided that I’d be better drawing with pen on paper and finally, for the last two panels, I went back to my iPad. As you can see from my rough, I thought about including the blackbird incident and the hawthorn nibbling as panels but then I decided that, rather like a situation comedy, this strip should focus on the relationship between the two ponies on their home turf.
On balance, I probably prefer the extra action in my original rough, but it’s time to leave this strip and go on to a fresh one, and I have got plans to take the characters further afield.
On the Nose
The second cartoon strip inspired by the ponies we pass on our regular morning walk. In the final frame, I’m getting pretty much the look that I had in mind. I decided not to go for shadows this time. I like the simplicity of flat colours.
Talking of flat colours, in one tutorial (see link below) I discovered that you could not only save swatches in a ‘Colour Set’, you can also name them.
Link
Making Comics for both Print and Webtoons Clip Studio Paint tutorial by SimonWL
A Stable Relationship
I used the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint for this comic strip. In reality, the Shetland Pony has now dispensed with its pony blanket, although another pony in the field has taken to wearing a pink pony blanket and an insect shield hood over its face and ears. There’s probably another comic strip in that pink pony blanket.
Basil
Another doodle, drawn to help me get familiar with the basics of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint. This is from page one of an eight-page comic, but this is as far as it’s going, as I’ve already managed all the basics by adding characters, background, speech bubbles, call-outs and even a 3D object.
Basil is a neighbours’ Persian cat with Siamese markings who wanders ponderously through our garden and occasionally makes a run at the birds at the feeder. He flounces across the lawn towards them like a frantic feather duster, so the birds spot him long before he gets in pouncing distance. I like him as a potential comic character, but he’s a bit too close to Garfield at the moment.
Party Folk
With all bars and pubs now closed until further notice, this Clip Studio Paint illustration was based on a pen and wash sketch from four or five years ago. As usual, as a drawing, I prefer the original sketch but I love the process of constructing a comic-style illustration, particularly when it gets to the final stage of dropping the tones in with the paint bucket tool.
Ruth
I’m now onto the final part of my Clip Studio Paint Tips for Digital Outlining! tutorial by Eridey. I’m following a step by step demonstration of how to draw a female comic book character but basing my version on a 1985 sketch of Ruth, a communication design student at Leeds Polytechnic. I’m attempting to replace my tentative pen and wash with the graphic style of the tutorial, so my character is getting jet black hair instead of the fair hair of the original Ruth.
This is unfamiliar territory for me, so I’ll probably try working up several different sketches of people to get the feel of the process. Ultimately, I will use the techniques in my own way but first I want to understand how comic strip artists go about achieving their crisp and confident style.
I start with the G-pen, drawing the face and then, on a separate layer, the outline of the hair.
Blocking in
Next stage is to fill in the outline of the hair using the paint bucket tool. I draw the hands on another layer, on top of everything else, but initially you can see through to the layers below, so I need to create a layer mask, which in effect cuts a hand-shaped hole in the hair. It’s a technique that I’ve never used before, so that’s something new that I’ve learnt from going through the tutorial.
I then add individual strands of hair. The highlights are drawn using the G-pen loaded with transparent ‘ink’, rather than opaque white, so it’s like cutting into the area of black as you would when drawing on scraperboard.
Finally, on a base layer, I add tones of grey using the paint bucket tool. The simplified tones make me think of printmaking. But the original sketch is probably still my favourite!
Digital Outlining
I love going through tutorials and as this one, a Clip Studio Paint tutorial, Tips for Digital Outling by Eridey, is especially appealing as it is more about drawing than technical details. My spheres have turned out wobbly and I know there’s a way around that, but that isn’t the point of the tutorial, it’s just the line drawing that we’re interested in here:
“The outline is a fundamental part of the illustration, sometimes it can be frustrating, especially when we see that our sketch looks better than the final version.”
Eridey
Yes, that’s a familiar feeling.
Link
Tips for Digital Outlining Clip Studio Paint tutorial by Eridey
Farm Shop Cafe
Every character who walked into the Farm Shop Cafe made me think that I’d like to try animating them. I’m currently reading Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, based on a long-running series of drawing classes that he arranged for Disney animators, inbetweeners and clean-up artists. My aim here was to try to catch gestures, which Stanchfield describes as mini-stories. His method is rather like the way that I attempt to draw people walking by: getting an instant impression of the whole pose and character. I think of it as taking a mental photograph, a test of memory, but Stanchfield wants us to develop the storytelling elements suggested in the pose, costume and character in that instant.
Having tried animating in Clip Studio Paint EX on my iPad Pro, I now feel much more at home using it for the much simpler process of designing a comic strip. Putting my random sketches into the frames of a Clip Studio comic strip immediately gets me thinking what could the story be here, even though I know these four people had no connection with each other. I added each pose to the frames at random, just to fill the grid that I was drawing as I went along.
The only conscious connection that I imposed was adding the bearded man to fill the left-hand side of the letterbox frame. That implied a conversation with the coffee-drinking man already occupying the right-hand side of the frame. I turned the eyes of the characters towards each other but resisted the urge to add word balloons, I’ll experiment with that in another sketchbook comic strip.
Note that, on Stanchfield’s advice, I’ve at last gone back to my sketchbook. This one is A5 portrait format; my pocket sized A6 sketchbook isn’t big enough for quick random sketches. I’d soon find myself running off the edge of the page.
Strider
With apologies for putting this snippet on a continuous loop, but it would be too short otherwise . . .
Please press pause before it drives you mad!
I’ve come back to an old favourite drawing program, Clip Studio Paint, which, in the EX, version can be used for animation on an iPad. It’s not as simple to use as the FlipaClip program that I experimented with the other day, but it offers far more possibilities when it comes to drawing, not that you’d realise that from this loop animation, which I’ve drawn simply to go through the stages of the process.
The thing that had me mystified was the relationship between frames, layers, folders and animation folders. If you can grasp that you can just get on with the drawing and track your progress in the animation instantly with the click of a button. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, it’s just that it’s SO OBVIOUS that most YouTube tutorials don’t explain it clearly enough. Fighnimates‘ How to Animate in Clip Studio! (see link below) was the tutorial that finally enabled me to grasp the principle of using animation folders in the timeline.
The point about grasping the way layers work in the timeline is that I can have my background in one layer and my walking man in a separate layer above that. Getting the man to move for two seconds involved 24 separate drawings. Once I’d got the hang of all that, I realised that I could draw the man’s shadow on a separate layer below the man but above the background. Doing it that way, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally drawing over the silhouette of the man as I drew in the shadows. Of course the shadows also needed to be 24 separate drawings.
I believe that there is now an option to add a soundtrack in Clip Studio Paint, but in this case I stuck to the method that I’m familiar with and added it later when I’d exported the MP4 movie to Adobe Premiere Pro on my desktop iMac. The pair of trainers used to supply the sound effects for the bouncing ball and for the footsteps of camels crossing the Gobi Desert, once again came in for the man’s footsteps.
And I’m sure that my friend Karen Chalmers, who composed and performed the soundtrack for my Brief History of Rhubarb animation, would like me to make it clear that I’m the one who is responsible for the short solo performance on ocarina.
Link
How to Animate in Clip Studio Paint! twenty minute video tutorial by Fighnimates